The decision to hit the fire button at any moment during his
workday - unleashing a smart bomb that can kill dozens of people -
depends on the interplay between U.S. troops, intelligence
operatives and remotely placed cameras and listening devices, all
connected by an intricate computer network. Before the button is
pushed, networked consultations typically occur among officials at
the Pentagon, White House, CIA and National Security Agency.

All of that information flows over what we assume is a secure
military computer network. Other networks link Humvees, M1A1 Abrams
tanks, jet fighters, intercontinental ballistic missiles and
laser-guided bombs. For example, step into the command center for
troop training at Fort Hood for their next deployment to
Afghanistan, and you'll see a mind-boggling display of tracking
screens and computer consoles.

Even as U.S. Special Operations troops waged war on horseback
during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, they still used
satellite-linked laptops to punch in coordinates guiding Predator
missiles against groups of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

That's how we fight wars today. But if this computer network
isn't as secure against sabotage as we think, could our
microcircuit-dependent military be hamstrung in a future war?

Think about our transportation network. When cargo containers
are loaded onto trains at the International Inland Port of Dallas
or any other major port in the United States, a terminal operator
controls the giant rolling container crane remotely using a
networked satellite link. Like the drone pilot, he can operate the
crane from a console seat thousands of miles away.

The planes taking off and landing at Dallas/Fort Worth
International Airport also are guided by an intricately linked
computer network. So are the subway trains that run under
Washington and Manhattan. The ability of utilities to manage
pipelines and electrical grids largely depends on their linkage to
computer networks. And then there's America's entire financial
system; our ability to buy groceries and gasoline, pay bills and
get cash is heavily dependent on this technology.

Shut down these networks, and you can shut down America.

When someone throws around words like "cyber security," most of
us think of what's in front of us: our computer screens. To us,
cyber security is making sure our anti-virus software is up to
date. But that's not exactly what President Barack Obama had in
mind last year when he named a new cyber security czar to sit on
the National Security Council and declared cyber security to be a
top national priority - right up there with defeating al-Qaeda and
preventing nuclear war.

This week, Dallas will become the focal point for this priority,
when 400 representatives from 40 countries gather for the first
Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit. Its sponsor, the New York-based
EastWest Institute, was founded at the height of the Cold War in
1980 to foster greater communication across the Iron Curtain.
Today, its mission is to make the world safer by serving as a
discreet organizer of international dialogue on issues that pose
dangers to peace.

Serious work lies ahead for participants, who hope to solidify
alliances and deepen cooperation toward reducing the threat of
global cyber war.

Obama made cyber security a top priority after a series of cyber
attacks exposed how truly vulnerable our nation is. The Pentagon
says its computer defenses are probed hundreds of thousands of
times a day. Typically, those probes are unobtrusive "pings"
designed to look for potential points of entry into a network. Once
that entry point is identified, more aggressive means, called
"hacking," are used to exploit vulnerabilities. Of 75,000 hacking
attempts in 2005, 1,300 succeeded. A 2007 attack led to a massive
loss of government data and penetrated all the way to Defense
Secretary Robert Gates' personal e-mail. Last April, the Pentagon
said expenses to recover from, or guard against, cyber attack
totaled $100 million for the previous six months alone.

This is not fear mongering. The threat is real, with an
established record of damage to national security. The Air Force
earlier this year established a new U.S. Cyber Command to address
the growing number of attacks on military networks. The warnings
coming from the government today are startlingly similar to the
unheeded concerns about a major domestic terrorism threat in the
years before the 9/11 attacks.

"The United States confronts a dangerous combination of known
and unknown vulnerabilities, strong and rapidly expanding adversary
capabilities, and a lack of comprehensive threat and vulnerability
awareness," Michael Brown, deputy assistant secretary of Homeland
Security, told a House panel in April. "We currently cannot be
certain that our information infrastructure will remain accessible
and reliable during a time of crisis."

Retired Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege Jr., who ran the precursor to the
Cyber Command, described for me a vast landscape of interdependent
networks linking the nation's core commercial, infrastructural and
governmental functions. If the network can be exploited for
strategic or financial gain, he said, someone will have a motive
for penetrating it - including other governments, terrorist groups
and criminal organizations. In a full-blown attack, America's
enemies would have compiled a list of cyberspace "pain points" that
could be hit to cripple the many crucial functions that keep our
country going.

In July, a series of "denial of service" worms spread through
millions of computers across the United States, Europe and South
Korea. North Korea is suspected of having launched the attack
remotely. French, German and U.K. military computer networks were
penetrated and partially disabled. And this was believed to be a
relatively minor attack.

"It was more like a noisy demonstration," wrote James A. Lewis
of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in
Washington. "A serious cyber attack would be an incident that
disrupted critical services for an extended period, perhaps
damaging military command or information systems, shutting off
electrical power or fuel pipelines, or interrupting financial
services."

Experts say the level of intelligence-gathering and
sophistication required for such a massive attack would be
extremely hard for a group of basement computer geeks or turbaned
terrorist groups to acquire.

Our biggest problem is with other governments, which can muster
the armies of people and computers necessary to work remotely and
deploy the complex - and well-hidden - logic bombs, cyber robots
and worms that await digital orders to attack en masse.

Experts consistently identify China and Russia as our main
adversaries, suggesting that in cyberspace, the Cold War is still
very much alive.

When nuclear weaponry was the main security issue confronting
the superpowers, deterrence was the primary means of protection.
The doctrine of mutually assured destruction held that countries
with the bomb were constrained from ever using it because they knew
that an equally devastating counterstrike would quickly follow.

But quick retaliation is much harder in the Internet version of
a nuclear first strike, mainly because it's exceedingly hard to
identify the attacker. And it's hard to define what an appropriate
retaliatory response might be.

Richard Clarke - former U.S. national coordinator for security,
infrastructure protection and counterterrorism - says that in all
likelihood, other governments already have deployed cyber "bombs"
at key points in our financial, military and infrastructural
computer networks. They might never activate them, but they keep
them there just in case relations sour and they feel it's time to
gain a strategic advantage.

There's every reason to believe the United States similarly has
penetrated the secure networks of our major potential
adversaries.

"Since the beginning of time, nations and armies have tried to
gain information about others, whether they be friendly nations or
potential enemies," says Raduege, who is speaking at this week's
summit in Dallas.

Establishing defenses to protect our computer networks from
cyber attack is only half the battle. In a real war, the hardware
part of these networks also remains vulnerable. A vast array of
weaponry, using electromagnetic pulses, has been designed to knock
out the micro-circuitry that comprises all computer systems.

Raduege spent most of his 35-year military career studying the
effects of electromagnetic pulses. The good news, he said, is that
the fiber-optic cable that makes up much of our ground-based
communication network would survive an EMP attack. But anything
that uses micro-circuitry would be "tremendously impacted," he
explained; the pulse would "literally fry" such components.

For the military alone, it's a serious concern, according to
Collin R. Miller, a U.S. Air Force colonel. In a 2005 essay, he
outlined the "eye-watering" array of systems that enabled the swift
initial military successes in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Data links,
displays, satellite communications, computerized planning systems,
GPS receivers, radios, smart munitions, vehicles, aircraft and all
other systems required to support the networked force will derive
their power, and potentially their doom, from fragile electronic
systems," he wrote (emphasis added).

A single electromagnetic pulse weapon, he says, "can kill
electronic systems in an area the size of a tennis court or
throughout the entire United States."

We know this because our country has developed and tested such
weapons, clearly with plans to deploy them in the event of war
against another technologically advanced country. But it would be
naive to think we're the only ones with this weaponry.

More chilling is the fact that an electromagnetic pulse bomb
would be relatively easy for terrorists to build and deploy. In
2001, Popular Mechanics magazine described an electromagnetic-pulse
bomb that it said could be built for $400 and would be capable of
sending out a pulse that "makes a lightning bolt seem like a
flashbulb by comparison." It wouldn't harm humans but would fry all
the microcircuits we rely on, including in our cars. Imagine real
disaster scenes like those depicted in ABC's hit show Flash
Forward.

As citizens of the most technologically advanced country in the
world, we've marveled at, adapted to and incorporated into our
daily lives hundreds of new electronic innovations. Most people
don't want to be bothered with all this mumbo-jumbo about cyber
attacks, but we do want to know that our cellphones and ATMs will
work when we need them to.

Few of us bother to contemplate the utter upheaval that would
ensue if something caused our microcircuit-dependent world to
suddenly crash. Meetings such as this week's summit in Dallas are
designed, in part, to ensure that the threat doesn't become
reality.

In some ways, though, it really does come down to people like
us, sitting in front of our computer screens, because any one of us
could host the next big bug. About a decade ago, while living
abroad, I got a call from my Internet service provider saying they
were shutting down my service because I was exceeding my usage
limit. I was unaware that a program, surreptitiously installed via
e-mail on my wife's computer, was sending out thousands of spam
e-mails a day. Add a few thousand other unwitting hosts, and that's
how easy a serious attack can happen.

I like to think of life after a massive cyber attack as being
akin to the astronaut survival scenes depicted in the film Apollo
13. Every now and then, I find myself playing Tom Hanks and picking
up the old circular slide rule I used in high school, just to see
if I can remember the way things worked before computers took over
our lives. Then I marvel at how closely it resembles the size and
shape of my cellphone, which can perform far more complex
calculations and functions in a nanosecond.

How far we've come. And how devastatingly difficult life would
be if we had to go back.

Tod Robberson is a Dallas Morning News editorial writer. The
views expressed in this column are his own. His e-mail address is
trobberson@dallasnews.com.